Fortnite Players Are Taking The Winterfest Gift-Giving Changes About As Well As You’d Expect
Josh has been playing video games for longer than he can remember, kicking things off with a Master System before upgrading to a Mega Drive. Covering the industry since 2018, if a game has a strong story – or even better, the decisions you make determine the course of that story – odds are he’s going to like it. Or, you know, put Sonic or Pikachu on the cover and that’ll get his attention too.
Fortnite’s annual Winterfest event is back and in full swing, but this year, there’s a catch. If you don’t open your daily gifts fast enough, they get taken away, and the tweak to how Winterfest works has unsurprisingly gone down like a lead balloon.
Every year, Fortnite has gifts you can click on and virtually unwrap, skins and other cosmetics waiting inside. You’re limited to one gift per day, but missed gifts would stack. That meant if you didn’t log in for three days, the next time you play, you could unwrap three presents of your choosing.
Fortnite s Winterfest Gifts Disappear This Year, And Players Aren t Happy
That is not the case this year. If you miss a day, you miss a turn, and while there are fewer gifts than there are days of Winterfest, which means you can afford to skip a few days without missing out on a gift, if you miss too many days, Lt. Winter, Fortnite’s Santa, steps in and takes the gift back.
That’s not a funny way of saying you don’t get the gift. That’s literally the message players have been met with if they don’t open their presents in time. The change to how Winterfest presents work has generated quite a bit of backlash, not something Epic likes at the best of times, but particularly not during the holidays.
Epic’s big Christmas giveaway is back with free games to claim throughout the holiday season.
FitzyLeaks has called upon their fellow Fortnite fans to petition a change, although at this stage, it might be too late to save this year’s WinterFest. The 12,000 likes, and counting, the post has received demonstrates just how unpopular the decision to put time limits on Fortnite’s gifts has been.
TheRagingRepaer’s response goes into far more detail about why they believe this to be such a poor decision on Epic’s part. They note that Winterfest has been a core stop on the Fortnite calendar for seven years, giving it the unwanted status of being among the ten worst decisions Epic has ever made when it comes to its hit battle royale game.
Remarkable that a game with a top ten of that description is as popular as it is, although I guess unpopular mistakes are part and parcel of that popularity.
Fortnite Players Are Campaigning For Change, But This Year s Winterfest Might Be Beyond Saving
The player urges others to speak out against the Winterfest changes, and that’s exactly what people have been doing. From calling it the worst decision ever to being described as “scummy”, it really does appear to be one of the least popular things Epic has done in Fortnite in recent memory.
That’s likely because the reason for the change is a pretty transparent one. There is really only one clear reason why Epic would suddenly decide to limit gifts to one per day and not have them stack. It’s a way to force people to play every day so that they don’t miss out. While it’s understood that the goal of a live service game is to get as many people playing every day as much as possible, to alter a tradition this way during a time of year when the holidays get in the way of people playing every day, even though they might not want to, it’s understandable why dedicated players might feel burned.
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